 Do rational people sometimes act irrationally? A dynamic self-regulation model of sustainable consumer behaviorAlistair Ulph, Luca Panzone and Denis Hilton Economic Modelling, 2023, vol. 126, issue C Abstract: Significant literature in behavioral economics and psychology has examined why an individual's moral decisions sometimes appear irrational. For example, an individual may display “moral licensing”, whereby performing a good act licenses a subsequent less moral act. Another example is the “foot-in-the-door effect,” whereby an individual makes a substantial increase in the likelihood of a pro-social behaviour when there has been no change in the circumstances under which the decision is made. Both forms of behavior seem to violate economists' assumption of rational consumer behavior. This paper constructs a simple dynamic model of rational consumer behavior and shows that this can generate both moral licensing (or moral cleansing) and foot-in-the-door effects. We also discuss the implications for government policy. Keywords: Behavioral consistency; Moral self-regulation; Moral licensing (cleansing); Dynamic model of consumer behavior; Sustainable consumption (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecmode:v:126:y:2023:i:c:s0264999323001967 DOI: 10.1016/j.econmod.2023.106384 Access Statistics for this article Economic Modelling is currently edited by S. Hall and P. Pauly More articles in Economic Modelling from Elsevier |
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